Age Vs. Youth Takes Twist In Miami Beach

MIAMI BEACH — The elderly people who dominate this city can get discounts on medicine, bus rides, restaurant meals, movie admissions, bug exterminators, airplane tickets, dry cleaning, greens fees, checking accounts -- and on and on.

But when Robert Blum, 59, offered a 15 percent ''yuppie discount'' to people 25 to 50 years old on rent at the luxury beachfront Carriage House highrises he manages, he was accused of age discrimination.

He was ordered by the director of the Metro-Dade Fair Housing and Employment Appeals Board to pay $50,000 to Evelyn Weissman, 57, who was denied the discount when she tried to move from one apartment to another.

Weissman was offered the apartment for $750 a month. But she then heard that a young couple was offered an apartment for $637.50 a month.

Dr. Janet Launcelott, the fair housing board director, said the ''yuppie discount'' violated a 1975 county ordinance banning age discrimination.

The decision so angered Robert Jednak, a young travel agent, that he wrote Launcelott demanding she investigate senior citizen discounts offered at Barnett Banks, the Fontainebleau Hilton hotel and Eastern Airlines as part of a campaign ''banishing all forms of discrimination against younger people.''

The dispute has spilled over into Broward County, where Richard Grayson, 34, told the county human relations board that free checking for senior citizens at Amerifirst Savings and Loan was age discrimination.

Launcelott, 50, who is working with Dade County commissioners to rewrite the discrimination ordinance, called senior citizen discounts ''improper but highly commendable.'' She said that because Jednak did not file a formal complaint, she has no plans to attack the legality of the discounts.

Senior discounts vary, but generally they are granted to those 60 years and older, or 65 and older. A least some discount offers start at 55.

In Miami Beach, where city leaders want to lure young families with money to reverse an image as ''the gateway to heaven,'' the dispute has set off a debate over the privileges and perquisites that come with age.

The dispute of the generations coincides with a pioneering attempt by Miami Beach to lure cash-laden ''spring break'' college students from their traditional Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach haunts. A ''welcome'' tent has been put up on the sand in the hope of showing hospitality to students taking advantage of lower hotel costs and less crowding than at the other beaches.

Once the most glamorous vacation resort in the United States, Miami Beach has made progress in trying to climb out of decades of slump that saw the city gain a reputation for having an elderly, and increasingly poor, population.

The average age of the 98,000 Miami Beach residents in the 1980 census was 65. City Manager Rob Parkins estimates that now the average age is 53.

The drop is in part attributable to Cuban refugee families who arrived in Florida in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, after the census was taken. They moved into inexpensive, run-down apartments in South Beach, which city promoters now call South Pointe.

With thousands of apartments and condominiums just a 10-minute ride via causeway from the office towers of downtown Miami, Miami Beach has begun to exploit its assets to lure young professionals, their families and their money to the island city.

But gentrification brings fears of dislocation among the poor elderly living far from the luxury Carriage House. If ''yuppie discounts'' spread, they could threaten a patience to wait for the elderly to ''attrition down'' -- a polite way of saying die off -- to rejuvenate the Beach.

''The idea is not to get rid of the old people, but to fill the vacancies with younger people with money in their pockets,'' said City Commissioner Bruce Singer, 35, who went to snowbound Northern college campuses in the winter touting the virtues of a spring break in Miami Beach.

It seems as if everyone is choosing sides, from city officials to radio talk show hosts to chambers of commerce to people in the street. Though the elderly are the biggest voting bloc, Miami Beach's elected officials appear totally behind Blum.

''My mother lives in the Carriage House and her floor was empty except for her for five years,'' said City Commissioner William Shockett, 46. ''She's thrilled she has young people and children on her floor now.''

''What's good for the goose is good for the gander,'' said Stan Shapiro, 56, an activist urging elderly residents to support Blum for the good of the city.

But David Nevel, 36, an attorney and an owner of the famous Wolfies restaurant on Collins Avenue, warns against ''rampant insidious bigotry against the elderly in this society which values youth, especially among those who want to deny that they will soon be old themselves.''

Nevel said, ''They have to be careful not to encourage housing programs that make it more difficult for elderly people on fixed incomes to find affordable housing.''